Description
What is Christendom in IR? Christendom does not equate to a particular historical empire or community of believers but a series of theo-political imaginaries of a world where the church and secular authorities share power. As intellectual historians of the discipline have demonstrated, International Relations (IR) was founded on the ontology and theology of Christendom – and then rapidly forgot that fact. One major feature of this forgetting is a narrow historical conception of Christendom – its equation with Latin Christendom – in contrast with the wealth of scholarship in the humanities which has revealed various conceptual forms and practical examples of Christendom from the fourth century to the present. The effect of this narrowness has been to confirm IR’s historical eurocentrism and prevent it from exploring the international politics of Eurasian, eastern orthodox forms of Christendom and signs of new Christendoms emerging in the Global South. But such neo-Christendom raises the possibility of the very violence associated with Latin Christendom. Alternative theologies of post-Christendom suggest such outcomes are far from determined. These theologies may also be most attractive to agnostic IR scholars willing to engage with political theology as an interpretative framework. In this vein, the article advocates a plural and global conception of Christendom in our descriptive theory and normatively advocates ‘post-Christendom’ as a model of the politics of Christianity on a global scale.
